PuzzleHUMP!

If you were to ask me if I would rather solve puzzles or watch amateur pornography, I'd have to ask "what kind of puzzles?" Under most circumstances, I'd opt for the porn, and as fate would have it, Seattle's third annual amateur porn film festival, HUMP!, was screening October 5 and 6.

Puzzlehunt, by contrast, is October 6 and 7, but since I didn't find out about HUMP!'s showtimes until, wait for it, the evening of October 5, I was pretty much hosed. Instead of rushing downtown and hoping to get a ticket for a 10 PM show, I curled up into a ball on my air mattress and convulsed with wracking coughs and a searing fever of, ballpark guess here, 100 degrees.

Monk woke me to tell me it was dinner time. I rolled over, ignored him, and fell back asleep. The fever had broken by morning, which is when Monk woke me again to tell me to get ready for Puzzlehunt.

Puzzlehunt, just so we're clear on this, was hard, but a lot of fun. I tried to take a picture of the event's antagonist, Outermage, but it didn't turn out so hot. He/It was a really nicely done bad-guys-from-Tron outfit that looked amazing when the lights were off. The whole production was really nicely put together.

For the record, I have yet again been informed that I am "a wealth of useless information".

I regret not getting a chance to see HUMP!, and since they destroy the tapes at the end of the last screening each year, those raunchy little slices of Americana are lost for the ages. Maybe next year I'll have the forethought of actually buying tickets. I do not regret getting to participate in Puzzlehunt, and since the puzzles I saw are equally once-in-a-lifetime, I get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking on how I got to be a part of it. I'm a man of my word. If I say I'm going to solve puzzles, then fuck it, puzzles trump pornography. Next year I aim to accomplish both.

If anything, this illustrates an important aspect of Seattle living: there is something happening every weekend. While this was also sorta-kinda true in Cleveland, I was in a significant enough rut to never actually get off my duff and go get tickets to Damien Rice, or trek over to the Cinematheque to watch The Seventh Sign. I intend to not let that happen this time around. If Puzzlehunt and HUMP! hadn't been going on, I could still have talked someone into attending the Built to Spill concert.

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the last month and a half. Some things I'm ready to talk about, others I haven't really formulated a concrete opinion yet. I am living in interesting times. At some point, I hope to move beyond the anger and betrayal and come to terms with the fact that there is no justice in the world other than what we can assert through our own wills. Nothing is fair, and some day I'm going to have to embrace that fact.

Leaving Neverland sucks.

Ready, Set, HUMP!: "This is the third year of The Stranger's amateur porn contest, and it's the biggest, dirtiest HUMP! yet. This year's venue—On the Boards—seats three times as many people as last year's venue, and it has a bar! Advance tickets for all eight screenings have sold out, but a small amount of rush tickets will be available at the venue on a first-come, first-served basis before each show."